Stalinist Rumania Closes In on Itself

By CRAIG R. WHITNEY, Special to The New York Times

Published: July 15, 1989

BUCHAREST, Rumania, July 10—
While Hungary and Poland move toward a multiparty system and all of Eastern Europe ponders its future, Rumania steadily closes in on itself in pursuit of the Stalinist visions of its leader, Nicolae Ceausescu.

Part of that vision is now almost a reality in the capital, in a monument so huge it virtually defies description. It is a colossal white stone building, called the Palace of the People, from which Mr. Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, will rule the country after it is opened next month.

From the palace, Victory of Socialism Boulevard marches in a broad, straight line of high-rise buildings containing apartments for Government functionaries and stores whose salespeople say the luxury goods are only for display, not for sale. The boulevard cuts for more than three miles through what used to be the choked, chaotic neighborhoods of the old city.

In the parlance of the place, the old neighborhoods have been ''systematized,'' a process that has begun in the countryside as well, raising widespread fears. Social Vision Cited

The foreign diplomats who have watched Mr. Ceausescu's growing self-obsession say there is a social vision at the root of it all - a wish to transform Rumania from a backward, agricultural society into a socialist, industrial nation much like the one Stalin tried to build, with the same totalitarian methods, in the Soviet Union.

''I think he's a man who believes deeply,'' a Western diplomat with long experience of Eastern Europe said of Mr. Ceausescu. ''He signed onto Stalin's kind of Communism in 1933, and believed deeply that it was the solution to his country's weakness and backwardness. Maybe now he only believes in himself, but as a committed Marxist-Leninist.''

In the town of Scornicesti, Mr. Ceausescu's birthplace 100 miles west of Bucharest, what the Rumanian leader is trying to escape from and what he is trying to force the country to become stand incompatibly side by side.

The wells and outhouses and wooden cottages of Mr. Ceausescu's peasant boyhood are being crowded out and pushed over to make room for high-rise concrete and stone apartment dwellings. Memorial to His Father

Mr. Ceausescu was born in Scornicesti on Jan. 26, 1918, and relatives still live in his parents' house under the cherry trees. A uniformed guard warns visitors to stay on the other side of the street, where a memorial drinking well stands in memory of Mr. Ceausescu's father, Andruta. In a hilltop cemetery a few hundred yards away, a white marble gravestone bearing a cross and an engraved portrait of Andruta and Alexandra Ceausescu stands before a chapel. There is a startling resemblance between father and son.

The shrine and the fountain bespeak filial piety, not dictatorial self-glorification. The true monument is in the construction along the town's new Boulevard of Labor, which has now put high-rises in place of about half the village's rustic country houses.

If the peasants who live there are happy with the transformation, or miserable, a stranger cannot tell. There is wariness and fear in their eyes, for they may not speak to foreigners without reporting to the ubiquitous police, and few dare to try. Replacing Old With New

In a series of speeches a year ago, Mr. Ceausescu threatened to liquidate thousands of villages, saying that any rural settlement of under 2,000 people was not economically viable and that people living in such places should be housed in town-like ''agro-industrial complexes'' instead. His speeches prompted fears abroad that Mr. Ceausescu would bulldoze the country's priceless architectural heritage in the name of collectivization.

Mr. Ceausescu's original statement that 7,500 villages would have to go by the end of the century was fudged by Rumanian officials after international protests branded the project a monstrosity. But Western diplomats here believe the program will continue.

The threat was thought to be particularly acute for the country's two million ethnic Hungarians, who live mainly in rural settlements in Transylvania, and to some ancient, architecturally valuable German settlements in the north. #3 Neighborhoods Bulldozed In fact, according to Western and Hungarian diplomats here, not a single Hungarian village has yet fallen under the ax. But a handful of rustic garden neighborhoods on the outskirts of Bucharest, the settlements of Vladiceausca, Ciofliceni, and Dimieni, have been bulldozed in the last year.

When it happens, it is apparently with little warning, and residents are given little chance to appeal.

''There have been reports of villages that have opposed attempts to even start systematization,'' a Western diplomat said. A diplomat from a different country was told by Rumanian contacts that residents of two villages earmarked for modernization in a northern district had marched to their mayor and threatened to kill him unless the project was stopped.

In practice so far, ''systematization'' seems little different from the kind of relentless modernization of old neighborhoods that has been going on for 20 years in Moscow.